I am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it. I’m sorry I can’t properly introduce myself, but I don’t have a name. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries. Mine might have started with an ‘R’, but that’s all I have now.

Warm Bodies is one of those books that I fell in love with from the start and just want to tell people to read it. They are the kind of books that are hard to write a review for, I don’t want to spoil a thing for potential readers. One of the most moving and beautiful books I’ve read this year and believe it or not, it’s about zombies.

Our narrator, R is a zombie. He lurches and groans. He kills people and eats brains. With the brains come flashes of memories from the lives of his prey. R has always seemed a little bit different than the others, maybe a little less gone but when he saves the life of a living girl, Julie, things really start to change. He may have eaten her boyfriend but he will do everything to keep her safe. Is it possible that a zombie can love? Is there any chance for either of them in the doomed world they live in?

Zombies are the creature du jour this year but this isn’t your average zombie story. Whilst most are a message of how bad things can get, this is a tale of hope. It is also full of well crafted prose and there are so many passages that are quotable. If you want to challenge your preconceptions of a genre in 2012, you could do a lot worse than reading Isaac Marion’s utterly wonderful novel.

Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head whilst people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.